


Daughters Have Fathers

by friendlyrejection



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: ALL OF IT, all the brain damage, how much brain damage does chell have, potato induced existential crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 03:07:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8354512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendlyrejection/pseuds/friendlyrejection
Summary: Chell had her share of life threatening moments. Most of them involved some kind of fire or an increase of speed. None of them had occurred while she was standing still in the dark.





	

"Bring your daughter to work day. That did not end well."

Chell went down the line of trio-panel displays as the core lit them up one after the other, commenting on the productional merit of children's science experiments. She tuned him out. In the short time she had known the sphere, she had gotten very good at it. She was by no means on friendly terms with 99.99% of Aperture robots, but at the very least this one hadn't explicitly tried to shoot, gas, or crush her. They were practically best buds for life. Until she got to the surface and left him on the side of the road.

Chell took in each of the hand made posters. The uneven scrawl was not unlike the graffiti she'd seen hidden on the walls after she woke up, but these lacked the kind of frantic instability of the aforementioned artist. Whoever they were, they didn't dot their I's with little hearts. Looking at something made by humans always made her pulse even out to something nearing a normal resting heart rate. She pushed away her gut instincts of searching for white walls and measuring trajectory, and tried to focus on the symbols. They were almost foreign; only a few of them vaguely resembled arrows or warnings. Slowly she remembered; they were letters. P-O-T-A-T-O. She tried reading. Pot-a-to... battery. Potato battery? 

Non-survival based knowledge was slowly crawling its way back to the forefront of her thoughts: you could connect things to a potato and it would register an electrical current. She had a feeling that this knowledge was connected to a person. To people. She wanted to believe that this was a memory she actually experienced. She knew there used to be other people, it was evident the facility used to be crawling with them. But she knew they had been long dead before she was ever alive. She had spent so long being untrustworthy of everything around her that she didn't even trust herself. Chell stopped thinking about it before she proved herself right or wrong. 

"Lookit that its growing right up into the ceiling! The whole place is probably overrun with potatoes by this point isn't it? At least you wont starve though." She turned the corner and was happy to see that a robot wasn't lying to her. A huge root system exploded from a tiny vegetable. This was probably why she had been met with so much green when her previous memories of the facility were so completely void of it. Chell was impressed at its ability to survive for this long without any sunlight. She examined the display, the little potato drawings with upturned mouths, the stars decorating the corners of the boxes. _With a special ingredient from dads work._ Dad. That was right, daughters had fathers. GLaDOS wasn't making up the concept of family after all. Still she wondered what a family was like. All her visual memories where nothing but white walls and blue and orange holes. Anything other than that was sunk in the deepest, cloudiest water of her mind. Not even splashing at the surface could make the vague and indistinguishable figures any clearer. Instead of spending more time trying to remember things she never experienced, she went back to the poster. _By Chell._

Chell stared at the two words like they were trying to speak to her. C-H-E-L-L. Che-ll. Although she hadn't moved by the slightest of increments, her pulse ran like it was being chased. Every corner of her brain was trying to process what she was seeing. It didn't make sense. Chell untied her jumpsuit and turned over the fabric that would have rested over her heart. C-H-E-L-L. Chell looked up. C-H-E-L-L. They were the same. How could they have been the same? She didn't have a lot of memories in general, but to the best of her knowledge her life began on an oval bed with that stupid radio. She was barely able to read, when was she able to write? When did she have a dad? If she knew a dad, that meant she knew other people. Why couldn't she remember any of them? Why didn't she have any memories of a dad? She thought as hard as she could, turning over everything she thought she knew. Black walls didn't conduct portals. Jumping into an angled exit portal will fling you with more momentum than a vertical one. Most robots will try to kill you. Potatoes conduct an electrical current. There was a place outside of the facility. She wasn't supposed to be here. Nothing explained this. It didn't make sense. It must not have been real.

She moved uncharacteristically slowly. An empty hand lifted from her side. A foot stepped forward. Weight shifted. Her fingertips floated through the air, and stopped right in front of the impossible word. Chell had her share of life threatening moments. Most of them involved some kind of fire or an increase of speed. None of them had occurred while she was standing still in the dark. She stood, veins frantically moving ice through her body. If she moved her hand through that tiny amount of space and it came into contact with the board, it would have to be real. 

Chell tied up her jumpsuit and continued walking through the ruined offices. 

-

Sevral hundred lifetimes ago, a seven-year-old girl sits at a kitchen table at two a.m. Around her are sheets of copy paper, ribbon, crayons and a potato connected to a volt meter. She works dutifully, happily awake despite the time. She isn't alone: her father sits to her right, his own sheets of copy paper strewn about him with lines of hand written code. He was also wide awake, but the bags under his eyes belied not only a need for sleep, but a fight between an ethical man and a desperate one. His daughter had gotten used to staying up as late as her father to work beside him and help where she could. Each of his papers was marked with small drawing in the upper left hand corner of the page. A red apple. An orange carrot. A yellow dandelion. The order continued across the papers, all the way to a green zucchini. Her father sifted through the spread around him, lifting up papers and scanning for a specific line.

"You want this one," said his daughter in a confident tone, and pointed to a blue spot on one of the papers with the other end of her colored pencil. Oh, a blueberry. 

"Ah. thank you Chelly-belly." His daughter smiled a cheeky smile and went back to work, happy that she was able to help her dad. Her father looked over at his daughter, coloring away. He was reminded of a promise he made. He scootched out of his chair and lifted his daughter out of hers by the armpits, making her giggle and squirm in the air.

"C'mon kiddo, that ain't due til Friday, and its way past our bedtime."

**Author's Note:**

> chell: and where did that other chell come from. who is she.  
> -  
> for some reason i thought chell's jumpsuit had her name on it really tiny somewhere. see, all this memory shit isnt limited to mute lunatics.


End file.
